All State Businesses Deserve Tax Help
Hooray for Hollywood! Oh, yes, and hooray for batteries for electric cars. And another hooray for some jet plane manufacturers. It seems the state Legislature has found a number of causes to create state tax credits to encourage business and jobs in the Golden State. All well and good, but what about businesses that don’t […]
No Room at the Inn: California’s Latino Legislative Caucus Closes Door on Republicans
The influential California Latino Legislative Caucus has a generic moniker and an ostensibly-benign mission statement which promotes “legislation and policies that have a direct impact on Latinos from all walks of life,” and “diversity in state government…by advancing qualified candidates from all walks of California.” Well, in carefully choreographed subterfuge, this public face of the […]
How Soccer Explains Elections
While many records are broken every year, there are two worth drawing attention to during the first half of 2014: the levels of participation in elections and soccer. With 25.2% turnout, California appears headed to a record low for a statewide primary. Explanations vary, ranging from voter contentment to structural shortcomings to California’s turnout is actually […]
The California Economy: When Vigor and Frailty Collide (Part. 1)
California is a place of extremes. It has beaches, mountains, valleys and deserts. It has glaciers and, just a few miles away, hot, dry deserts. Some years it doesn’t rain. Some years it rains all winter. Those extremes are part of what makes California the attractive place that it is, and, west of the high […]
7 Ways James Fallows is Wrong About the CA Bullet Train
Writing on The Atlantic’s website, the much-respected journalist/intellectual James Fallows — a Redlands native who knows California better than nearly all other national pundits — has come out as a big fan of the state’s bullet-train project. He promises to return frequently to the project in coming months and explain all the ways that it […]